In-Win Power Supply Units Roundup: Second Attempt

In-Win Company occupies a popular niche of inexpensive, good-quality system cases (and power supplies because In-Win manufactures them on its own), so today we are going to see if the quality of the PSUs is up to the customers’ expectations. We will test PSUs from IW series and the new IP line including AJ and Q series (total 6 PSUs).

A little over a year ago I reviewed power supplies from In-Win and was left somewhat disappointed (for details refer to our article called In Win Power Supply Units Roundup). The company’s model range included only out-dated ATX12V 1.2 models and not a single ATX12V 2.0 one. And the then available models didn’t perform too well in my tests. I have also heard repairmen complaining at insufficient reliability of In-Win power supplies, mostly due to a multi-piece standby source, i.e. assembled out of separate discrete components, whereas a majority of manufacturers have long come to use special-purpose integrated controllers like Power Integrations’ TOPSwitch or Fairchild’s Green FPS.

Still, I’ve got some interest in In-Win power supplies. The company occupies a popular niche of inexpensive, yet good-quality system cases (and power supplies because In-Win manufactures them on its own), so I’d want to see if the quality is up to the customers’ expectations. Moreover, In-Win has begun to ship its power supplies apart from system cases as boxed versions. And the most exciting thing is that the company has introduced new PSU series in which the model names begin with the letters IP instead of IW.

For this review I tested both boxed versions of PSUs and those installed into system cases. I didn’t spot any significant difference, however, so you can apply the results of the boxed IW-P430J2-0 to the IW-P430J2-0 that comes along with a system case and vice versa.

Labels on boxes with system cases used to indicate the specific model of the installed power supply, but the labels on some In-Win system cases only show the wattage of the PSU.

I will start out with two old models from the IW series and will then go over to the new IP line that splits into two series, AJ and Q. The Q series is remarkable since it is the only ATX12V 2.x-compliant one that In-Win is currently offering.